We are constantly blasted with visual information, to the extent we may no longer look and see. Susan’s pared down landscapes bring order, balance and control to an often chaotic visual world as she observes the distant and mundane and brings to the viewer a new ordered sense of beauty.

Susan’s paintings, like the landscape she is inspired by, reach their outcome after a slow, long process of give and take, adding to and taking away.

Stef Mitchell

Artist and Curator

The work by Susan Laughton shimmers with subdued colour, elegant and restrained but captured fleeting glimpses of landscape and structure you sometimes don’t remember seeing. The combination of craftsmanship and intelligence leaves a lasting impression.

It’s not often that I insist people see something up close to appreciate its beauty, but in the case of Susan Laughton’s work, I do. The iridescence of each piece, and the sense of stillness they exude, requires more than just a jpeg. Each trace line has meaning, each tiny mark a message like some kind of artist hieroglyphics. The overall effect is incredibly calm & beautiful.

On looking at photographic images of Drifting I, a work that appears sparse, yet up close is richly and imperfectly textured, I am reminded of a similar experience of getting caught up in the physical details an inch or so away from Agnes Martin's large format abstract works. However, unlike that subjectless painter's work, Drifting I holds open a space between the primacy of material, the quavering, scratched visual field and a barely-there narrative snapshot of what might be snowfields at dusk. Taking seriously that painterly dialectic between its function as emotive, symbolistic window-to-the-soul and as opaque, modernist object, this work's shadowed, white borders also lend it a 'polaroid' quality, hinting at an as-yet undeveloped, or perhaps lost, momentary vision.

Significantly, Laughton's titles ostensibly refer to events and objects figured in a bleak Northern landscape: drifting snow, getting lost and finding one's way, clouds, traces of journeys and storms. Yet, as attention to the physical working and reworking of her paintings reveals, these words and phrases refer as much to the process of raw materials - acrylic, gouache and plaster - dragging and 'drifting', tracing and layering right there on the canvas, as they do to any inner or outer world.